Thousands of displaced Kathmandu riverbank residents are struggling to survive in makeshift shelters and open streets after the government launched a massive demolition drive to clear informal squatter settlements.

In Balkhu, Kathmandu, a woman named Mandira crouches amid broken concrete and splintered wood. Just days ago, this rubble was her home. Today, she scours the debris for anything salvageable – a dust-caked blue sweatshirt for her 10-year-old son, a pair of faded pants, and a handful of chickpeas she shares with a friend. Mandira’s wrist is fractured, injured in a frantic rush to save her family’s belongings before the government bulldozers arrived to tear down her world. Her husband is suffering from tuberculosis, and with nowhere else to go, her family spends their days on the streets, returning to a friend’s increasingly hostile rented room only to sleep.

Mandira’s plight is not an isolated incident. Over the past few weeks, Nepal’s federal government, under the directive of newly elected Prime Minister Balendra Shah, has initiated a massive eviction and demolition drive across the Kathmandu Valley. Aimed at clearing informal settlements along the Bagmati River and its tributaries, the campaign has reduced thousands of homes to rubble in areas including Balkhu, Banshighat, Thapathali, Gairigaun, Balaju, and Manohara. While the government defends the move as a necessary step for environmental protection and flood management, human rights groups and displaced citizens are sounding the alarm over a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis.

The Human Cost of Urban Beautification

The immediate fallout of Kathmandu’s riverbank clearance campaign is painted vividly across the city’s newly exposed shores. In Balkhu alone, authorities demolished 486 temporary structures on May 1. Residents in nearby areas like Banshighat were given shockingly short notices by the District Administration Office – sometimes merely 24 hours – to vacate. As a result, many households were forced to pile their meagre belongings outside on the dirt, where unexpected spring rains soaked what little they had left.

Further down the demolished strip in Balkhu, a young mother sits under a makeshift bamboo structure, breastfeeding her 18-month-old son. Her husband frantically waves a splintered baby rattle, trying in vain to keep the swarming flies away from the child’s dirt-streaked face. The family, originally from outside the valley, cannot afford the bus fare back to their village. Without cooking gas or a place to build a fire, they have not eaten a proper meal in days.

For older residents, the demolition has erased decades of history. Lakshmi, 55, sits on a small stool staring at a pile of debris that was her home for 22 years. The nearby church where her eight-year-old granddaughter attended school has also been flattened, leaving the young girl’s education in limbo. Pratap Mahat, a 24-year-old day labourer who moved to Kathmandu to provide his children with an education, stands by his wife in the wreckage. Struggling to find work and forced to rent an expensive room in Kalimati, he feels a profound sense of failure. “My son asks me to buy things for him, and I cannot afford them. It is embarrassing,” Mahat says, summarizing the deep indignity forced upon the displaced.

Inside the Temporary Shelters

In response to the sudden crisis, the government has scrambled to set up temporary holding centres to accommodate the newly unhoused populations. At Sundarighat in Kirtipur, 47 displaced households from the Thapathali and Gairigaun settlements have been temporarily housed inside the Radha Soami Satsang Beas Nepal premises. Similar staging camps have been established at Dasharath Stadium in Tripureshwor to register the evicted families.

However, life inside these shelters is fraught with anxiety and harsh restrictions. The Sundarighat shelter is a roofed structure without internal walls, offering absolutely no privacy for the families sleeping on thin mats spread across the floor. Security is unyielding; police personnel stationed at the gate require residents to strictly log their names and departure times whenever they leave, enforcing a 6 PM curfew that many find suffocating.

While the metropolitan office has deployed sanitation workers, volunteers, and doctors to check on the displaced, the overwhelming sentiment among residents is profound uncertainty. Khamba Singh Budhathoki, an elderly man whose home was destroyed, previously lost a house during a similar eviction drive in 2011. He is deeply worried about the disruption to his grandson’s education. The government has promised to relocate verified “genuine squatters” to apartment housing in Nagarjun, but Budhathoki is anxious about the hidden costs. “I cannot afford to rent a room,” he explains. “If we have to pay even in the place the government provides, I won’t be able to manage.”

Government’s Justification and Relocation Efforts

Prime Minister Balendra Shah has fiercely defended the demolitions, framing them as a necessary part of the government’s “100-point governance reform agenda.” Authorities argue that the decades-old informal settlements are illegally encroaching on public land, heavily polluting the Bagmati river civilization, and placing residents at severe risk of seasonal flooding.

In rare public statements regarding the backlash, Shah took to social media to state that the relocations are entirely lawful and ultimately designed to provide a permanent solution to a systemic problem. The prime minister promised that no citizen would be left homeless. Officials argue that temporarily staging families at holding centres like Dasharath Stadium is necessary to conduct background checks and distinguish true landless individuals from “land mafias” exploiting the settlements. Once verified, genuine squatters will supposedly be moved to the Nagarjun apartments or other state-provided housing.

Despite these assurances, local authorities openly admit that permanent relocation sites have not been fully prepared, and Kathmandu Metropolitan City’s chief administrative officer, Saroj Guragain, recently conceded that the city lacks sufficient space to immediately rehouse the thousands facing displacement. As of early May, over 2,200 landless squatters have approached the government seeking rehabilitation.

Human Rights Concerns and Growing Backlash

The aggressive speed of the evictions has drawn intense criticism from civil society leaders and international observers. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have condemned the forced evictions, calling them a dangerous erosion of lawful governance. They argue that evicting families without prior verification, meaningful consultation, or guaranteed alternative housing risks turning a complex urban governance challenge into a preventable human rights crisis.

Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the outgoing UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, recently expressed deep concern over the threat of forced evictions looming over Kathmandu’s residents. Meanwhile, Nepal’s Supreme Court has issued a show-cause order to the government following petitions against the aggressive removal of squatters from public lands.

Locally, the squatter communities are fighting back. The All Nepal Landless Squatters Association has launched nationwide protests, demanding immediate rehabilitation, halting the bulldozers, and calling for an end to policies that give families mere hours to abandon their lives.

As the monsoon season approaches, the standoff continues. For city planners, the cleared riverbanks represent a step toward a cleaner, more resilient Kathmandu. But for thousands of people like Mandira, Lakshmi, and Budhathoki, the demolition drive has simply left them destitute. They wander a city that no longer has a place for them, endlessly asking each other the same pressing questions: “Where will we sleep, and what will we eat?”